FICTION/POETRY

All That Is, by James Salter (Knopf; 290 pages; $26.95). Salter's latest novel spans the second half of the 20th century and shows that few can match his depictions of life's physical pleasures, the sheer sensual delight of being in this world.

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf; 477 pages; $26.95). Adichie's novel is a brilliant treatise on race, class and globalization, and also a deep, clear-eyed story about love.

Amor and Psycho: Stories, by Carolyn Cooke (Knopf; 178 pages; $24.95). Cooke writes with humor and great affection for people, and she is unafraid to take on the inexplicable.

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The Art of Joy, by Goliarda Sapienza; translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 685 pages; $30). Sapienza locked her epic novel in a chest for two decades and now, several years after her death, the masterpiece tracking the life of a Sicilian woman is finally available in English.

At Night We Walk in Circles, by Daniel Alarcón (Riverhead; 374 pages; $27.95). In his novel set in an unnamed Latin American nation recovering from years of civil war and government repression, Alarcón creates a rich stratum of memory and regret.

Belmont, by Stephen Burt (Graywolf; 96 pages; $15). Burt's sobering and mature collection of poems is a celebration of the ordinary.

Related Stories

Benediction, by Kent Haruf (Knopf; 258 pages; $25.95). Haruf, who works miracles in miniature, returns to the setting of previous works, the fictional town of Holt in Colorado's High Plains.

The Blood of Heaven, by Kent Wascom (Grove; 457 pages; $25). Wascom has produced an astonishingly assured debut that's set in the Deep South of the frontier years.

A Brief History of Yes, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Dalkey Archive Press; 119 pages; $14). Marcom's novel is a beautiful elegy for lovers lost within bittersweet recollections.

Brown Dog, by Jim Harrison (Grove Press; 525 pages; $27). Harrison's collection of novellas, centered on the misadventures of a singular character, Brown Dog, is rich in character and incident, rude humor and melancholy.

Claire of the Sea Light, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf; 238 pages; $25.95). In her novel about a girl who has gone missing, Danticat makes clear that there is no such thing as one Haiti.

Death of the Black-Haired Girl, by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 281 pages; $25). Stone takes up the campus novel and bestows on it a laser eye and gift of soul and language he has heretofore reserved for more immediately arresting material.

Eleven Days, by Lea Carpenter (Knopf; 270 pages; $24.95). Carpenter's debut novel, about a woman's Navy SEAL son who has gone missing on a secret mission, tells a story that is at once timeless and also grounded in the very real vicissitudes brought about by current events.

Enon, by Paul Harding (Random House; 238 pages; $26). Harding's novel is a first-person account of the grimmest kind of ordinary tragedy - the death of youth, the black hole of a parent's grief into which the reader is invited to peer.

The Fun Parts, by Sam Lipsyte (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 229 pages; $24). Disillusionment and despair run deep in this collection and infect nearly every character. But Lipsyte's biting prose masks the sadness so well that it's often hard to detect.

Goat Mountain, by David Vann (Harper; 239 pages; $25.99). The world of Vann's novel, set during a family's hunting pilgrimage in Northern California, is ceaselessly violent - not an easy place to visit. But readers will devour Vann's masterful plotting.

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker (Harper; 486 pages; $26.99). Wecker's debut novel is delightfully Dickensian, an ensemble of characters destined to re-encounter and reckon with one another against an epic sprawl of time and civilizations.

A Guide to Being Born: Stories, by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead; 198 pages; $26.95). One of the many charms of Ausubel's enthralling stories is her potent combination of the otherworldly and the mundane, the absurd and the familiar.

The Hotel Oneira: Poems, by August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 91 pages; $24). Kleinzahler's poetry delivers bouquet after bouquet of lovely phrases, so that even if readers can't quite remember the lost world he is recovering, they can enjoy his skill, which is considerable.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead; 228 pages; $26.95). The power of Hamid's novel lies primarily in the intelligence and fearless stylistic choices of the narrative.

I Want to Show You More: Stories, by Jamie Quatro (Grove; 206 pages; $24). Quatro very much establishes her own distinctive style in these stories that animate authentically the voices of teenagers and children.

The Infatuations, by Javier Marías; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf; 338 pages; $26.95). Marías' novel is an arresting story of love and crime and a young woman smitten with a man and his wife.

Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge: Stories, by Peter Orner (Little, Brown; 198 pages; $25). Orner makes his much-anticipated return to the short form, gifting readers with a magnificent mosaic of remarkable narratives.

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown; 529 pages; $27.99). Atkinson's latest is a time-travel novel of sorts, but with a voice and sensibility purely its own.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., by Adelle Waldman (Henry Holt; 242 pages; $25). With an uncommonly sharp eye, Waldman dissects a minor romantic failure in all its contemporary complexity.

The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf; 340 pages; $27.95). Lahiri's novel is a plaintive and haunting story about undying love - romantic, brotherly and parental.

Mary Coin, by Marisa Silver (Blue Rider; 336 pages; $26.95). Using Dorothea Lange's photograph "Migrant Mother" as a fulcrum, Silver's novel is a bracing and beautiful excavation of a subterranean history.

Memories of a Marriage, by Louis Begley (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 188 pages; $25.95). Begley's 10th novel, a shifting take on two characters with little in common but a broken wedlock, is a consummately constructed monument to human imperfection.

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, by Lucy Corin (McSweeney's; 183 pages; $22). Corin's delightful book offers comedy and disaster in equal measure, with stories that specialize in surreal occurrences.

Pacific, by Tom Drury (Grove Press; 194 pages; $25). On the surface, Drury's slim novel is a disarmingly plain tale about people managing loss. But look closer, and you'll see it's as deep as the ocean it's named after.

The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday; 368 pages; $26.95). Yanagihara's enthralling debut about a scientist's journey into a bizarre and remote land, the hubris of reason, and the limits of cultural relativism is at once learned, morally serious and deeply entertaining.

Rage Is Back, by Adam Mansbach (Viking; 290 pages; $26.95). A rollicking, frenetic and hilarious jaunt through the (literal and figurative) New York City underworld, Mansbach's novel is a nostalgic love letter to the city and the golden age of graffiti.

Schroder, by Amity Gaige (Twelve; 272 pages; $21.99). In her superb novel, Gaige makes Eric Schroder, a man who kidnaps his 6-year-old daughter, utterly sympathetic - heartbreakingly so - which is part of the book's intelligence and depth.

Someone, by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 232 pages; $25). McDermott's novel - about one Irish American family's migration from Brooklyn in the '30s to the Queens and Long Island of the '60s - is another masterly performance by a sublime artist of the quotidian.

The Son, by Philipp Meyer (Ecco; 561 pages; $27.99). Meyer's powerful epic chronicles the tortured history of Texas, told through the perspective of three generations.

The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Riverhead; 270 pages; $27.95). Vásquez's novel is an unsettling chronicle of how the violence between Colombia's cartels and government forces spilled out to affect and corrode ordinary lives.

Stay Up With Me: Stories, by Tom Barbash (Ecco; 212 pages; $22.99). This is a wise, infatuating collection that delves into our most intimate preoccupations.

The Story of a New Name: Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions; 471 pages; $18). The through-line in Ferrante's work is nothing less than one long, mind-and-heart-shredding howl for the history of women and its implicit j'accuse.

T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle Vol. 2 (Viking; 918 pages; $45). Whether he's writing about survival in a wasted environment or people and animals coming unhinged, Boyle never fails to captivate, to deliver his ideas within the conveyance of first-class storytelling.

The Translator, by Nina Schuyler (Pegasus; 352 pages; $25). In Schuyler's moving and intelligent novel, a real neurological phenomenon brought on by accident leaves a translator unable to speak English, though she can comprehend it.

Traveling Sprinkler, by Nicholson Baker (Blue Rider Press; 291 pages; $26.95). In Baker's joyful and melancholy novel, a sequel to 2009's "The Anthologist," poet-narrator Paul Chowder continues to get derailed by his surroundings.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories, by Karen Russell (Knopf; 243 pages; $24.95). Russell's astonishing stories range from fable-like to gothic to experimental to almost traditional, with prose so alive it practically backflips off the page.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler (Putnam; 310 pages; $26.95). In her latest novel, Fowler captures the very real connection between long-lost sisters - one of whom isn't human.

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, by Bob Shacochis (Atlantic Monthly Press; 715 pages; $28). Shacochis' grand novel will surely stand as the definitive political thriller of those fragile years of relative peace before Sept. 11, 2001.

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, by Deborah Solomon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 493 pages; $28). Solomon's book is not only a first-rate biography but an eye-opening glimpse inside the strange, often inexplicable sources of creativity in the arts.

Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace, by Beverly Donofrio (Viking; 224 pages; $25.95). Donofrio's book is a smart and surprisingly funny memoir about the spiritual journey she takes after a man breaks into her house and rapes her at knifepoint.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, edited by Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith (UC Press; 733 pages; $45). Vol. 2 of this work adds up to an audacious portrait of America on the cusp of the 20th century, and a snapshot of the American people.

The Book of My Lives, by Aleksandar Hemon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 214 pages; $25). These essays, all but one previously published, offer a satisfying composite of the man behind the novels and stories.

Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, by Lucas Mann (Pantheon; 318 pages; $26.95). With candor and steady self-reflection, Mann charts his year as a superfan of the Clinton, Iowa, LumberKings, a Seattle Mariner class A club.

Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, by Gary Kamiya (Bloomsbury; 384 pages; $27). In his rhapsody to San Francisco, Kamiya has written its defining lyrical panorama for a generation or longer.

Country Girl: A Memoir, by Edna O'Brien (Little, Brown; 357 pages; $27.99). In her mesmerizing memoir, the Irish writer recounts the struggles and triumphs of a tumultuous life.

A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley, by Neal Thompson (Crown Archetype; 421 pages; $26). In his jaunty biography, Thompson relates a buoyant, boozy tale of adventure and enterprise.

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Richard Rodriguez (Viking; 235 pages; $26.95). As Rodriguez investigates "the ecologies of the holy desert," what he creates is more like an ecology of the soul. And unlike the desert, it teems with life.

The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II, by Charles Glass (The Penguin Press; 380 pages; $27.95). In his exploration of a little-known corner of the "greatest generation" - an inflated term - Glass makes a convincing argument that many deserters were men simply broken by war's brutality, sometimes after conspicuous times of bravery.

Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, by David Margolick (Other Press; 382 pages; $28.95). By mining an impressive archive of correspondence, Margolick not only highlights glimpses of literary brilliance from a cultured writer but also unearths his more complicated and sometimes not-so-likable characteristics.

Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, by Terry Teachout (Gotham; 482 pages; $30). All the elements of Ellington's colorful, complicated, oft-secretive life - public and private, musical and personal - are brought to vivid life in this grand biography.

Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, by Alysia Abbott (Norton; 326 pages; $25.95). Abbott beautifully remembers the innocence of the age between the disappearance of the Beats and the onset of AIDS, when the streets of San Francisco ran with fear and fever.

The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit (Viking; 272 pages; $25.95). Solnit's brilliant, genre-refuting book is a migration through continents and centuries, science and mythology, loss and solace.

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, by Amy Wilentz (Simon & Schuster; 329 pages; $27). This is a grief-filled communique from a writer with long experience of Haiti.

Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, by Blake Bailey (Knopf; 494 pages; $30). The closeted, alcoholic author of "The Lost Weekend," as Bailey's arresting biography affirms, was a writer harnessed to his demons.

Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu, by Monique Brinson Demery (PublicAffairs; 258 pages; $26.99). Demery succeeds in painting a nuanced picture of the woman David Halberstam called "the beautiful but diabolic sex-dictatress."

The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad, by Lesley Hazleton (Riverhead; 320 pages; $27.95). Hazleton's goal is not to urge readers to love, or to hate, Muhammad, but simply to understand the forces that produced him.

For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison, by Liao Yiwu; translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 404 pages; $26). Liao's prison memoir shocks us, entertains us with dark humor, and inspires us with examples of indomitable human dignity and decency.

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, by Janet Malcolm (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 298 pages; $27). Malcolm showcases the ambiguities of her subjects with the skillfulness of a collagist. Each snapshot, each scrap, each piece of a jagged puzzle has been cut with precision shears and expertly assembled on the page.

The Great War: July 1, 1916: The Battle of the Somme, by Joe Sacco (Norton; 54 pages, plus 16-page booklet; $35). Sacco's illustrated account of the opening of one of modern warfare's bloodiest campaigns has no real parallel.

Gun Guys: A Road Trip, by Dan Baum (Knopf; 338 pages; $26.95). This is a surprisingly funny book and an insightful and thoughtful exploration that brings some much-needed humanity to gun lovers and gun haters.

The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures, by Edward Ball (Doubleday; 464 pages; $29.95). Set securely in the context of the culture of the Gilded Age, Ball's history provides a beautifully written account of the collaboration of two ambitious, contentious and ultimately incompatible men.

Jack London: An American Life, by Earle Labor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 461 pages; $30). Labor wheels capably through London's transformations, proving particularly adept with his adventures at sea and in the Yukon, evoking the zest and courage that the young man brought to every physical challenge.

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse (Metropolitan; 370 pages; $30). Turse's book is a paradigm-shifting, connect-the-dots history of American atrocities that reads like a thriller.

Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, by Katy Butler (Scribner; 322 pages; $25). Butler uses her impressive reportorial talents to trace the social, scientific and economic forces that have led to our byzantine and inhumane approach to death.

Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent Into Darkness, by Alfredo Corchado (The Penguin Press; 284 pages; $27.95). Corchado presents a unique binational perspective in his deeply personal account of his experiences covering Mexico's struggle against drug trafficking, corruption and violence.

Mother Daughter Me: A Memoir, by Katie Hafner (Random House; 268 pages; $26). In her memoir about coming to terms with her far-from-perfect mother, Hafner never lapses into sentimentality, which is perhaps her most admirable trait as a storyteller.

My Foreign Cities: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Scarboro (Liveright; 296 pages; $24.95). Scarboro's oddly uplifting memoir is not just a story about the challenges of loving someone with a terminal illness; it's about recognizing those precious moments in life that Virginia Woolf called "moments of being."

Napalm: An American Biography, by Robert M. Neer (The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press; 310 pages; $29.95). Neer's book is a fascinating and long-overdue study of one of modern warfare's signature weapons.

National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism, by Melvin Goodman (City Lights; 456 pages; $19.95). With a convincing accumulation of examples, Goodman reveals how our political leadership's occasional impulse to arms-control accords or defense budget cuts have come to be thwarted by an ever more powerful Pentagon.

Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate, by Rose George (Metropolitan; 287 pages; $28). In her witty and revelatory book, George explores a little-known world of commerce.

Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power in India, by Amana Fontanella-Khan (Norton; 284 pages; $26.95). Fontanella-Khan paints a nuanced portrait of a teenage-mother-turned-social-crusader who is loud, boastful and blessed with a wicked sense of humor.

Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, by Ray Monk (Doubleday; 825 pages; $37.50). This is a splendid biography of an American hero, albeit one with tragic flaws.

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, by Emily Raboteau (Atlantic Monthly Press; 305 pages; $25). Raboteau's vivid and fascinating memoir tells the story of her desire to find a state of grace in a complicated world.

Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, by Shereen El Feki (Pantheon; 345 pages; $28.95). El Feki's central question in her frank, nonjudgmental and unsentimental book is intriguing: Will a sexual revolution follow the political revolutions that have rocked the Arab world?

She Matters: A Life in Friendships, by Susanna Sonnenberg (Scribner; 255 pages; $24). Sonnenberg's memoir is a dark and intriguing piece of writing, a brutal self-examination of her relationships with women.

The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking, by Brendan I. Koerner (Crown; 318 pages; $26). Koerner captures the tenor of the Vietnam War era with a splendid and stylish tale of the commandeering of Western Airlines Flight 701 by an emotionally disturbed AWOL U.S. Army soldier and his girlfriend.

The Still Point of the Turning World, by Emily Rapp (The Penguin Press; 256 pages; $25.95). Rapp's memoir is an impassioned and searing account of loving - and preparing to lose - her baby.

Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders, by Denise A. Spellberg (Knopf; 392 pages; $27.95). In her wonderful book, Spellberg shows that the question of the place of Muslims was integral to debates about American identity and political life from the very beginning.

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker (UC Press; 166 pages; $29.95). "Unfathomable City's" secret weapon is its imaginative cartography. If you think you know the city's streets, this atlas will make you want to walk them again.

Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf; 228 pages; $24). Deraniyagala conjures her family, lost in the 2004 tsunami, in this gorgeous memoir.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier (Simon & Schuster; 396 pages; $28). Lanier's latest book shows him as a wide-ranging thinker and advocate, embedding technology in the context of the rapid economic transformation and dislocation it is causing.

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, by Amy S. Greenberg (Knopf; 344 pages; $30). Greenberg's history elegantly unfolds the story of the U.S.-Mexican War through the lives of five politicians.

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, by Jon Mooallem (The Penguin Press; 339 pages; $27.95). With a wry sense of humor and an eye for storytelling, Mooallem walks readers through the wilderness of wildlife conservation.

The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA, by Scott C. Johnson (Norton; 304 pages; $26.95). In his searingly honest memoir, Johnson examines not only the lifelong career of his father, a CIA spy, but also his own life as a journalist and former foreign correspondent.

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan (Random House; 296 pages; $27). This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.